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Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air

Heard
1938
Episodes
19
Language
English

Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air Radio Show Recordings of 1938, including the infamous "War of the Worlds" broadcast that terrified much of the East Coast of the US on the day before Halloween 1938.

More about it

Welles' Mercury Theatre Company performed on stage, radio, and screen for 9 years. Many of their works continue to be seen as classic, instructive, historic, or exemplary to this day. Though it was Welles' success, the box-office hit that has been ranked by the American Film Institute (AFI) as "the #1 American motion picture of all time" Citizen Kane (1941) was a production in which Welles employed many regular collaborators from his Mercury Theatre. Likewise, he did so again the following year in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). (Though the final cut of the film was heavily altered from Welles' original cut and vision by the studio, RKO Radio Pictures in an attempt to lessen the artistic influence of Welles' direction believing it to be less marketable. Unfortunately, the financial failure of Ambersons doomed RKO as it was, and the studio's interference may have been their downfall. RKO would restructure later in 1942, and fired Welles and his Mercury Theatre members.) The Mercury Theatre troop would continue to perform from 1937 to 1946 regularly on both stage and radio.

Here are all 20 radio shows from their 1938 season on the radio as Mercury Theatre on the Air, before joining The Campbell Playhouse late in the year and through 1940. Enjoy!

Episodes, in broadcast order

  1. Dracula

    · 59 min

  2. Treasure Island

    · 1 h 04 min

  3. A Tale of Two Cities

    · 59 min

  4. I’m a Fool/The Open Window/My Little Boy

    · 59 min

  5. Abraham Lincoln

    · 59 min

  6. The Affairs of Anatol

    · 59 min

  7. The Count of Monte Cristo

    · 59 min

  8. The 39 Steps

    · 1 h 02 min

  9. The Man Who Was Thursday

    · 59 min

  10. Julius Caesar (Rehearsal)

    · 1 h 02 min

  11. The Immortal Sherlock Holmes

    · 59 min

  12. Hell on Ice

    · 1 h 00 min

  13. Seventeen

    · 1 h 00 min

  14. Around the World in 80 Days

    · 59 min

  15. The War of the Worlds

    · 57 min

  16. The War of the Worlds (Alt Version)

    · 1 h 00 min

  17. Heart of Darkness/Life with Father

    · 1 h 01 min

  18. Passenger to Bali

    · 1 h 00 min

  19. The Pickwick Papers

    · 59 min

Where it comes from 1

The archive items its episodes are played from, best first, with each one’s rights as its archive states them. An episode two sets both hold is played from the first.

  1. Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air (1938 Radio Show Recordings)

    Listeners' uploads · Orson Welles and His Mercury Theatre · 19 episodes here · archive.org

    the Internet Archive states no licence or rights for it.

Uploaded to the Internet Archive by the person named, outside its radio collections.

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Radio drama, old-time radio and historic broadcasts from the Internet Archive (its Old Time Radio collection with the Old Time Radio Researchers' sets, WWII Era Audio Recordings, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Radio Haiti Archive, German radio plays and listeners' uploads), Wikimedia Commons (with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision's broadcasts) and the Library of Congress. Every episode plays from its archive, which this site does not copy; rights are as each archive states them. Nothing here is called public domain on this site's say-so. In the United States, sound recordings first fixed before 15 February 1972 have federal protection under the Music Modernization Act of 2018, for most until 2067 at the latest, so most American radio of the 1930s to the 1950s is not in the public domain there. Each set shows the licence, mark or statement its archive gives, and says whose it is. Horror, crime, war and westerns are for teenage and adult profiles, racist caricature for adults only, and children’s profiles hear what was made for children. More about these archives.